On Day 3 of Parasite Eve's six day journey, during a sequence of events that are peaceful as they are chilling, our blonde, blue-eyed hero Detective Aya Brea is joined by her hot-blooded partner Detective Daniel Dollis on a stroll through an evacuated Manhattan seeking to liberate resources from abandoned businesses to use in their battle against the mysterious being known as Eve and the mutated creatures at her disposal.
They are followed by a civilian biophysicist named Kunihiko Maeda, whom they've allowed to travel with them, since his research on a being similar to Eve from his native Japan may prove useful. And he's also some skinny, unarmed nerd, so what harm could it do?
When the player takes control, the trio will eventually end up standing in front of Sams [sic] Gun Shop. When approached, Maeda rubs the crown of his head and says, "They weren't kidding when they said they sell guns here in America, were they..."and then reverts to a looped animation of furtive glances to the left and right.
When the door to the shop is examined, Aya will notice that it's locked. Her partner Daniel tells her to step to one side.
"Daniel, no..." says Aya. "Sorry, but it's the only way," Daniel responds.
With a flourish, Daniel pulls out his concealed firearm and shoots at the glass of the door surrounding its handle. Aya knows to cover her ears and turn away from the breaking glass. Maeda doesn't have time to react, and so makes no move until after Daniel already holsters his gun.
"Are... are you really a cop?" he asks.
"We think so," Aya says. "But we don't have scientific proof, if that's what you're asking."
As the player peruses the the shop for ammunition, Aya can find Daniel casually glancing between two products, and waves his arm out generously when approached. "Go ahead and pick your favorite accessories, ladies!"
Maeda, hunched over, peers through the protective glass at the bounty of weaponry, small and large: "This is just too much."
__________
There are are two NYPD officers who manage the weapons dispensary at Aya's Precinct 17 offices. The first the player meets, Wayne, coolly and possessively spreads his arms along the width of the front desk. "So what'll it be... Shotgun? Rocket Launcher?"
Wayne stands at attention when his supervisor, Torres, walks in to reprimand him. "Idiots like you are the reason why guns won't disappear from this country!" Torres tells Wayne to get his ass back to the storage room, and let a responsible adult handle the registration process.
That's right: the officer in charge of registering and dispensing new firearms to other cops HATES guns. He's not too obstinate though, and recognizes that gun violence is systemic, referring to it as a "vicious cycle" of law enforcement relying on guns because criminals do, and vice versa. Moreover, he recognizes that it's fair to bring heavy weaponry to a battle against an unstoppable, mutated terror.
Once Aya leaves, she's met by Wayne gain. Although Torres will only modify Aya's firearm with a permit, Wayne bypasses Torres' authority by letting her know that she can tune weapons on her own through the game's Tool system, the mechanic the player will use most to overcome mitochondrial monstrosities. "Trust me," Wayne says, "you can never have too much firepower".
__________
During the events of Day 3, Precinct 17 comes under attack by Eve's mutated creatures. As the player makes through way through the hostile territories, they reach the weapons dispensary and find Wayne over a fatally wounded Torres. "Why didn't ya shoot, man?!" Wayne asks him. Torres reveals that he hasn't even fired a gun since his daughter died. "Torres, you can't blame guns for that!"
"I suppose... you're right..." Torres concedes. He encourages Wayne to take good care of the place, and then dies.
Afterward, Wayne hands Torres' gun over to Aya, a decent weapon that he always kept in top working condition, although he never used it. Wayne reveals that, although Torres was an excellent shot, after his daughter's accidental death he stopped using guns - and, in fact, he relocated to Precinct 17 for the express purpose of filling the dispensary position and keeping all the guns in check out of a sense of duty.
And so the gun safety expert, constantly surrounded by weapons that could be used for self-defense, dies because he is unwilling to use one. Meanwhile, the brash gun enthusiast lives on because of his love for weaponry.
________
Parasite Eve is one of the few games by Square to take place in a world not framed by fantasty or cyberpunk aesthetics, and the very first to take place in a representation an actual real world, current time location. In a Square game, a player often makes use of magical items and equipment to surmount obstacles. Of course, magic doesn't exist in 1997 New York City - aside from the magic of Rockefeller Center at Christmastime. In lieu of giant swords or glowing crystals, the player uses something much more down-to-earth: guns.
Even then, firearms in Parasite Eve are treated with the same pomp and reverence as any mystical weaponry. Some of them even have fantastical qualities that sound feasible with the right wording - some ammunition is corrosive and deals acid damage, some grenades explode into... ice, and deal cold damage.
Consider that, to the average player within the originally intended Japanese audience, an actual gun might as while be a magic sword, and that playing Parasite Eve might be as close they will get to gun ownership.
Parasite Eve only briefly meditates on gun ownership and the use of firearms, but the choices made clearly indicate the game's origins. Maeda, the only Japanese character in the game, can rather easily explain concepts related to genetics and biochemistry, but can't quite wrap his head around the nature of American gun culture or the behavior of a New York City police officer.
This same outside perspective, though, offers a measure of moderation that isn't often seen in the national conversation regarding gun violence - a willingness to admit that the right answer isn't always obvious.
Wayne and Torres clearly both represent the opposite perspectives on guns in the country, with Wayne seeing no problem with putting limitless firepower in the hands of a citizen who wants it, and Torres not even believing that law enforcement should be using such weapons. It could be said that Torres, who dies, is the loser this debate. His ideas, though, live on in other officers at Precinct 17, who clearly had great respect for him, and in Wayne, who must take on his responsibilities. Although he did die during this one unbelievable situation, for the most part, aside from battles against monsters, his mediation on the vicious cycle of gun violence rings true.
That said... Wayne is much more cavalier about dispensing firearm modifications to Aya than Wayne was, going so far as to give them out in return for trading cards. What kind of trading cards? Trading cards with pictures of guns on them.
You can train someone to be responsible, and you can put obstacles in the way of someone who wants a firearm, but in the end, gun culture is bigger than any law or any one person.
December 3, 2015
July 31, 2015
Tifa and Aeris
There is one single moment that tells you everything you need to know about Tifa and Aeris, and the kind of people they are.
The calculations that go into deciding who Cloud dates at the Golden Saucer is based on how many invisible "affinity points" a given character has. Based on certain actions and dialogue choices, Tifa, Aeris, Yuffie, or Barret can gain or lose points.
When my wife and I played the game again this past year, we were determined to date Barret. We were successful -- with the help of a handy guide. Rather than spoiling the fun, the guide actually provided a lot of funny insight, like how romantic or gruesome particular decisions were interpreted based on the amount of points gained or lost.
But the biggest revelation comes pretty early on in disc one, when you have to infiltrate Don Corneo's lair.
If Aeris is chosen as Don Corneo's date, you can say to Tifa:
"You alright?" and lose 2 points for Tifa
or
"We gotta help Aeris!" and gain 3 points for Tifa.
If Tifa is chosen as Don Corneo's date, you can say to Aeris:
"You alright?" and GAIN 3 points for Aeris
or
"We gotta help Tifa!" and LOSE 2 points for Aeris.
Aeris and Tifa don't even know each other yet, but Tifa is still ready to help her, and Aeris doesn't give a shit.
That even the behind the scenes MATH of the game supports the characterization is fucking INSPIRING to me.
But still, it shows what good characters they both are. They've both had tumultuous pasts, but Tifa had the luxury of a stable home life for her formative years. Aeris, meanwhile, has had to run, hide, and mistrust all sorts of authority figures to stay alive and sane. Indeed, it could be seen as admirable that she's maintained her kindness despite so much trauma, but her somewhat arrested development shows that she was not unscathed. Her penchant for pink, her coyness, her fixation on guys in uniforms, making a living in a busy city selling flowers at 22 (?!) years old... all seem to bely an unwillingness to grow up because, well, her actual childhood sucked! While Cloud lacks a strong identity, Aeris actively manufactures her own. This, ironically, is what allows her do commit her most heroic act, and also her most dangerously naive: sacrifice herself for the sake of the world. Could it be that Aeris simply wasn't very happy inside?
Tifa, meanwhile, had her most traumatic experience at the cusp of adulthood. Because she has strong ideals ingrained on her by her family and her teacher and her peers, she is able to hold onto them and carry on, even after tremendous loss. This leads her to being somewhat reticent at times, like Cloud, but unlike Cloud, she is also sincere and usually more honest about her feelings.
I love these characters. Not just because the have crazy destinies and origin stories, but, besides all that, they're fucked up in the tragically banal way that lots of real young adults actually are. And they still carry on and care about each other.
From my comment on this
The calculations that go into deciding who Cloud dates at the Golden Saucer is based on how many invisible "affinity points" a given character has. Based on certain actions and dialogue choices, Tifa, Aeris, Yuffie, or Barret can gain or lose points.
When my wife and I played the game again this past year, we were determined to date Barret. We were successful -- with the help of a handy guide. Rather than spoiling the fun, the guide actually provided a lot of funny insight, like how romantic or gruesome particular decisions were interpreted based on the amount of points gained or lost.
But the biggest revelation comes pretty early on in disc one, when you have to infiltrate Don Corneo's lair.
If Aeris is chosen as Don Corneo's date, you can say to Tifa:
"You alright?" and lose 2 points for Tifa
or
"We gotta help Aeris!" and gain 3 points for Tifa.
If Tifa is chosen as Don Corneo's date, you can say to Aeris:
"You alright?" and GAIN 3 points for Aeris
or
"We gotta help Tifa!" and LOSE 2 points for Aeris.
Aeris and Tifa don't even know each other yet, but Tifa is still ready to help her, and Aeris doesn't give a shit.
That even the behind the scenes MATH of the game supports the characterization is fucking INSPIRING to me.
But still, it shows what good characters they both are. They've both had tumultuous pasts, but Tifa had the luxury of a stable home life for her formative years. Aeris, meanwhile, has had to run, hide, and mistrust all sorts of authority figures to stay alive and sane. Indeed, it could be seen as admirable that she's maintained her kindness despite so much trauma, but her somewhat arrested development shows that she was not unscathed. Her penchant for pink, her coyness, her fixation on guys in uniforms, making a living in a busy city selling flowers at 22 (?!) years old... all seem to bely an unwillingness to grow up because, well, her actual childhood sucked! While Cloud lacks a strong identity, Aeris actively manufactures her own. This, ironically, is what allows her do commit her most heroic act, and also her most dangerously naive: sacrifice herself for the sake of the world. Could it be that Aeris simply wasn't very happy inside?
Tifa, meanwhile, had her most traumatic experience at the cusp of adulthood. Because she has strong ideals ingrained on her by her family and her teacher and her peers, she is able to hold onto them and carry on, even after tremendous loss. This leads her to being somewhat reticent at times, like Cloud, but unlike Cloud, she is also sincere and usually more honest about her feelings.
I love these characters. Not just because the have crazy destinies and origin stories, but, besides all that, they're fucked up in the tragically banal way that lots of real young adults actually are. And they still carry on and care about each other.
From my comment on this
February 4, 2015
So I played Suikoden (or, Sometimes old ways are best)
Konami's Suikoden lacks the panache of some of its contemporaries from Square. Some of that has to do with technical know how, but also knowing how to deal with technical limits.
Characters in Chrono Trigger, like most Squaresoft games of the time, have a repertoire of expressions and motions that are reused and recontextualized throughout the game. Crono dealing the final blow to the Dragon Tank is incredibly awe-inspiring at the time it occurs, because we haven't seen him pull off anything quite like that yet. The violent thrust, especially coming after being wronged by the kingdom, adds a wrathfulness to him that we may not have expected. It is empowering, then, when you can voluntarily make Crono take similar actions as you learn his more complex techniques. By the end of the game, you'll have seen the animations quite a few times.
Here we have a really lovely and nuanced set of animations as the hunky doofus Flik plays host to the cougar counterfeiter Kimberly in order to enlist her. The scene has still more animations with fine detail, like hand movements and head tilts. Moments that are played like this in Suikoden - featuring a choreographed blocking particular to a location and a set of available props - can be counted on one hand. Flik and Kimberly do not drink sake again - these animations are unique to this scene. The commitment to this brief scene is admirable, but is it efficient from a development perspective - creating an asset that can't be reused?
In the time before 3D models were commonplace, animations could not be shared amongst characters like they are today. Sprites aren't like models that way. In 1995, to design and animate 108 characters for a new piece of hardware is no mean feat. A character needs to face and walk in all the cardinal directions, attack, use an item, get hurt, and be knocked out. Multiply that by about 80, and that's lot of work for a developer diving head first into a new franchise in a relatively strange genre.
The choice, then, to decide where to spend time applying unique, narrative-driven animations must have been difficult. (Especially when, it seems, battle animations and field animations are run on different engines and aren't interchangeable) Since it would be impossible to give every potential character in your party an animation appropriate to a particular point in the story, the choice was to leave leave most character reactions abstracted and up to the imagination. In exchange, story scenes with predetermined casts like the above have moments that make them stand out. That said, this particular scene is not particularly moving or informative, so in the end, the animations themselves are what make them worthwhile.
A lot of Suikoden's charm comes from this unpredictability in the narrative and the turns in tone it takes. Each leg of the journey reveals a different weapon or ally you attempt to bring into your army, but they aren't all alike in execution. It's not always easy to tell ahead of time what moment will result in a new unit, or a large scale battle, or a boss fight, or a duel. Or whether all of the above might occur back to back or simultaneously, for either a short duration or a long. This pattern keeps you guessing what will come next, forcing you to always be prepared and make use of each of the assets at your disposal as often as possible.
Although the brisk pacing makes you eager to find what big fight is around the next corner, the most disappointing thing about Suikoden is that, for the most part, there isn't one. Many times you may load out your party with the best equipment possible, find a great combination of characters with all the right runes and Unite attacks to make short work of any boss you'd find, and it rarely ever comes. There are only about 12 boss fights that involve the party you choose to bring with you, and half of them are weird monster lacking any narrative justification. The only way to measure the success of your tactics otherwise is against the randomly encountered riffraff along the way. It's a shame when there are so many interesting ways that 30 runes and 80 playable characters combine that there aren't that many appropriate challenges to test them on.
The other great challenges you face come in the form of great battles between thousands of tiny soldiers or one-on-one duels. They're both essentially games of rock-paper-scissors. That makes them sound simplistic - and really, they are - but that's not the whole story. Large-scale battles let you make your rock, paper, or scissors really big if you have the right people on your side, and duels challenge you to decipher which instrument your opponent will use based on context clues. The fact that so much rests on each decision, and that these situations come up as rarely as they do, makes the moments up to your choice quite intense.
What really makes Suikoden work, the urge that drives you even when you can't quite tell what character you should be using or how difficult the coming dungeon will be, is the constant growth you enjoy as times goes on, like a lovely colorful garden. Even just the recruits you gather mandatorily add up to make a huge cast. That so many people are willing to join you, and that so many of them have sound reasons for doing so - the main ones being vengeance and employment, but there's also glory and a hope to belong to something larger - reinforces the worth of your objective. Their personalities are portrayed succinctly and surprisingly deftly through a character portrait, their combat ability, and a few lines. Letting imagination take care of the rest, the 108-member cast of Suikoden is less annoying and/or pointless than most of the 40 playable characters in Chrono Cross.
Games like Suikoden invite player imagination by applying just enough abstraction in the right places. Older games than this have suggested fantastic battles between opposing armies, but few have let you put a face and a name to so many individual participants before. There is a limit, of course. You can't identify each of the thousands of soldiers that fight for the Liberation Army in the grand battles that occur a few times through the game, but knowing all the kinds of people that you've met across the land, you can assume what they might be like.
Liberation Army headquarters in the castle on the lake is a precursor to the hub worlds of later years, the lobbies of MMORPGs, the Normandy of Mass Effect - a small space that indicates the largeness of the world outside it with each addition to your war assets. With so many of your supplies being provided within your own domain, Suikoden could have done what later games would do, and simply teleport you to your next mission when necessary. Instead, they kept the iconic 16-bit world map with which you can go from place to place, random encounters suggesting the severity of each journey. Crossing the land by foot does provide a sense of ownership and responsibility that helps make your fight for peace worthwhile.
Some aspects of old design should be thrown out, and some aspects are simply tied to the technology or the trends of the time and die off naturally. The world map is a unique vestige of old design. It was not abandoned because it was a feature that arose from having to deal with old technology, but because even new technology is incapable of presenting an entire world in realistic proportions, and new trends wouldn't allow for a diminutive version of your protagonist crossing even tinier mountains to get from place to place. Today's method of representation, after the graphical arms race of the past decade and a half, has come to lean on 1:1 realism. The virtual space within games today are bigger than ever - there is more traversable surface area, anyway - but it can be argued in some ways that, without being able to artfully present an entire explorable globe, the scope is smaller.
At around the same time, Final Fantasy X, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, even Wild Arms 4 were all games that did not let the player traverse a world map, even while previous entries in their series did. (Dragon Quest 8, interestingly, would pull an Elder Scrolls and make the distance between towns and dungeons realistic in scale - while keeping random battles). A game could not be on a powerhouse console and fail to deliver on visuals, nor could a game deliver on visuals and find a way to justify the minimalist abstraction of an old-style world map. I tend to believe that the questing beast of realistic scale lead to the downfall of JRPGs that struck a few years back, leading to games that could not rewrite the traditional JRPG script to match these narrower scopes. (Consider Kingdom Hearts, a game about traveling multiple worlds that are each made up of about a dozen rooms or so, or Xenosaga, a game about humanity and the cosmos that is completely linear - but, mostly, consider the shittier games that copied both of these)
Naturally, it took years of failure to adapt to new trends for players and developers alike to realize that there is a place for old design. That's why Bravely Default, a 2014 handheld game with a world map, received such good response in comparison to Lightning Returns.
It's also why - I hope - Sony and Konami had the good sense to bring back interesting gems like Suikoden for reappraisal. Looking back, simplicity and abstraction in a game may seem like symptoms of technological constraint, but when you consider the best possible choices that could be made at the time, the effectiveness of some ideas never truly age.
The question at the end of the day is, how do you best provide any kind of fulfilling experience? By knowing when to show off and knowing when to let the user's imagination do the rest of the work.
Characters in Chrono Trigger, like most Squaresoft games of the time, have a repertoire of expressions and motions that are reused and recontextualized throughout the game. Crono dealing the final blow to the Dragon Tank is incredibly awe-inspiring at the time it occurs, because we haven't seen him pull off anything quite like that yet. The violent thrust, especially coming after being wronged by the kingdom, adds a wrathfulness to him that we may not have expected. It is empowering, then, when you can voluntarily make Crono take similar actions as you learn his more complex techniques. By the end of the game, you'll have seen the animations quite a few times.
Here we have a really lovely and nuanced set of animations as the hunky doofus Flik plays host to the cougar counterfeiter Kimberly in order to enlist her. The scene has still more animations with fine detail, like hand movements and head tilts. Moments that are played like this in Suikoden - featuring a choreographed blocking particular to a location and a set of available props - can be counted on one hand. Flik and Kimberly do not drink sake again - these animations are unique to this scene. The commitment to this brief scene is admirable, but is it efficient from a development perspective - creating an asset that can't be reused?
In the time before 3D models were commonplace, animations could not be shared amongst characters like they are today. Sprites aren't like models that way. In 1995, to design and animate 108 characters for a new piece of hardware is no mean feat. A character needs to face and walk in all the cardinal directions, attack, use an item, get hurt, and be knocked out. Multiply that by about 80, and that's lot of work for a developer diving head first into a new franchise in a relatively strange genre.
The choice, then, to decide where to spend time applying unique, narrative-driven animations must have been difficult. (Especially when, it seems, battle animations and field animations are run on different engines and aren't interchangeable) Since it would be impossible to give every potential character in your party an animation appropriate to a particular point in the story, the choice was to leave leave most character reactions abstracted and up to the imagination. In exchange, story scenes with predetermined casts like the above have moments that make them stand out. That said, this particular scene is not particularly moving or informative, so in the end, the animations themselves are what make them worthwhile.
A lot of Suikoden's charm comes from this unpredictability in the narrative and the turns in tone it takes. Each leg of the journey reveals a different weapon or ally you attempt to bring into your army, but they aren't all alike in execution. It's not always easy to tell ahead of time what moment will result in a new unit, or a large scale battle, or a boss fight, or a duel. Or whether all of the above might occur back to back or simultaneously, for either a short duration or a long. This pattern keeps you guessing what will come next, forcing you to always be prepared and make use of each of the assets at your disposal as often as possible.
Although the brisk pacing makes you eager to find what big fight is around the next corner, the most disappointing thing about Suikoden is that, for the most part, there isn't one. Many times you may load out your party with the best equipment possible, find a great combination of characters with all the right runes and Unite attacks to make short work of any boss you'd find, and it rarely ever comes. There are only about 12 boss fights that involve the party you choose to bring with you, and half of them are weird monster lacking any narrative justification. The only way to measure the success of your tactics otherwise is against the randomly encountered riffraff along the way. It's a shame when there are so many interesting ways that 30 runes and 80 playable characters combine that there aren't that many appropriate challenges to test them on.
The other great challenges you face come in the form of great battles between thousands of tiny soldiers or one-on-one duels. They're both essentially games of rock-paper-scissors. That makes them sound simplistic - and really, they are - but that's not the whole story. Large-scale battles let you make your rock, paper, or scissors really big if you have the right people on your side, and duels challenge you to decipher which instrument your opponent will use based on context clues. The fact that so much rests on each decision, and that these situations come up as rarely as they do, makes the moments up to your choice quite intense.
What really makes Suikoden work, the urge that drives you even when you can't quite tell what character you should be using or how difficult the coming dungeon will be, is the constant growth you enjoy as times goes on, like a lovely colorful garden. Even just the recruits you gather mandatorily add up to make a huge cast. That so many people are willing to join you, and that so many of them have sound reasons for doing so - the main ones being vengeance and employment, but there's also glory and a hope to belong to something larger - reinforces the worth of your objective. Their personalities are portrayed succinctly and surprisingly deftly through a character portrait, their combat ability, and a few lines. Letting imagination take care of the rest, the 108-member cast of Suikoden is less annoying and/or pointless than most of the 40 playable characters in Chrono Cross.
Games like Suikoden invite player imagination by applying just enough abstraction in the right places. Older games than this have suggested fantastic battles between opposing armies, but few have let you put a face and a name to so many individual participants before. There is a limit, of course. You can't identify each of the thousands of soldiers that fight for the Liberation Army in the grand battles that occur a few times through the game, but knowing all the kinds of people that you've met across the land, you can assume what they might be like.
Liberation Army headquarters in the castle on the lake is a precursor to the hub worlds of later years, the lobbies of MMORPGs, the Normandy of Mass Effect - a small space that indicates the largeness of the world outside it with each addition to your war assets. With so many of your supplies being provided within your own domain, Suikoden could have done what later games would do, and simply teleport you to your next mission when necessary. Instead, they kept the iconic 16-bit world map with which you can go from place to place, random encounters suggesting the severity of each journey. Crossing the land by foot does provide a sense of ownership and responsibility that helps make your fight for peace worthwhile.
Some aspects of old design should be thrown out, and some aspects are simply tied to the technology or the trends of the time and die off naturally. The world map is a unique vestige of old design. It was not abandoned because it was a feature that arose from having to deal with old technology, but because even new technology is incapable of presenting an entire world in realistic proportions, and new trends wouldn't allow for a diminutive version of your protagonist crossing even tinier mountains to get from place to place. Today's method of representation, after the graphical arms race of the past decade and a half, has come to lean on 1:1 realism. The virtual space within games today are bigger than ever - there is more traversable surface area, anyway - but it can be argued in some ways that, without being able to artfully present an entire explorable globe, the scope is smaller.
At around the same time, Final Fantasy X, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, even Wild Arms 4 were all games that did not let the player traverse a world map, even while previous entries in their series did. (Dragon Quest 8, interestingly, would pull an Elder Scrolls and make the distance between towns and dungeons realistic in scale - while keeping random battles). A game could not be on a powerhouse console and fail to deliver on visuals, nor could a game deliver on visuals and find a way to justify the minimalist abstraction of an old-style world map. I tend to believe that the questing beast of realistic scale lead to the downfall of JRPGs that struck a few years back, leading to games that could not rewrite the traditional JRPG script to match these narrower scopes. (Consider Kingdom Hearts, a game about traveling multiple worlds that are each made up of about a dozen rooms or so, or Xenosaga, a game about humanity and the cosmos that is completely linear - but, mostly, consider the shittier games that copied both of these)
Naturally, it took years of failure to adapt to new trends for players and developers alike to realize that there is a place for old design. That's why Bravely Default, a 2014 handheld game with a world map, received such good response in comparison to Lightning Returns.
It's also why - I hope - Sony and Konami had the good sense to bring back interesting gems like Suikoden for reappraisal. Looking back, simplicity and abstraction in a game may seem like symptoms of technological constraint, but when you consider the best possible choices that could be made at the time, the effectiveness of some ideas never truly age.
The question at the end of the day is, how do you best provide any kind of fulfilling experience? By knowing when to show off and knowing when to let the user's imagination do the rest of the work.
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